Tarantismo and the Modern Day Magician

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*"V

What, you've never heard of Eric and the Flying Tarantulas?"
Harold, a Flying Tarantula, sounded properly scornful.

1 had to confess, shamefacedly, that I was not up on the local rock
scene. Too many misspent hours in mouldering library stacks. I was a
medical anthropologist, I explained — looking at animal medicines. No,
not veterinary medicines, but medicines derived from the faunal realm.
"At the moment, I'm working on sting-ray venom and its ritual use by
the Maya. 'Byegone Trygons Of The Ancient Maw', I'm going to call
it."

Harold looked unimpressed. "We're into tarantula venom oursel-
ves," he said jadedly.

"Really'!" 1 said, suddenly rapt with fascination. It was a blue
moon— the second full moon in September— and I had just worked my
way backstage at the Nina Hagen concert, narrowly escaping an at-
tempted rape by a paraplegic in the lobby, and I was prepared to
believe anything. "Are you really'7" I pressed for details. "How do you
do it?"

They smoked it. it transpired. On joints. Just before they performed.

Harold expanded with gusto on his favorite theme while Eric looked
detatched and slightly supercilious. Eric, it appeared, did not do taran-
tula venom. It was "'Eric and the Flying Tarantulas", he pointed out
pedantically. He cultivated an air of precocious world weariness and
terminal ennui. The Tarantulas, it was explained to me. came and
went, in shifts or cycles. They had periods of dormancy where
presumably they recharged their shattered nervous systems but even-
tually resurfaced as dithyrambic as ever.

I peered at Harold, who looked normal enough, though ever-so-
slightly bug-eyed. He had about him an aging whiz-kid quality. Zooey
Glass. One of the Smart Patrol.

"What about Latrodectus mactans?" I asked, thinking to score a
point or two. Black widow poison was one I knew.

"Oh. that's a complete bummer." he said. "Don't even try it."

Harold was a bio-chem student and worked in the lab. Tarantula
venom was definitely an exotic. It was not in the Sigma catalog,
though they had everything from Bufo Marinus to Naja naja. They
were heavy on the snake venoms but spider venoms are still largely
terra incognita even for the practicing venomologist. "But how do you
get it?" I pressed. Here they hedged uncomfortably and exchanged
sidelong glances. "Well, if you're a bona fide researcher they can get it
for you as an 'accommodation'," Harold allowed. "But they're going to
scrutinize you..."

Just then R. U. Sirius and Lord Nose emerged from La Hagen's
dressingroom. "Boy, she's really out there." said Lord Nose. "I liked
the bit about the Space Brothers and the Music of the Spheres" said
R.U. . "Guess what'.'!" I exclaimed breathlessly. "This is Eric and one
of the Flying Tarantulas — they're into tarantula venom and I'm going
to write them up for the next issue!"

"Shhhh! Don't tell anyone!" said Harold, looking nervously over at
the other boardroom table full of reporters and photographers covering
Nina's "Ecstasy Drive '85" (next stop Rio). "It's extremely illegal and
we'll get into trouble."

"But how am I going to get you all this great publicity?" That was a
real slumblcr. and as Eric and I mooted over what could be revealed to
the vulgar herd, Harold suddenly interjected "Ever done any cow-tip-
ping'.'"

"What's cow -tipping?" we all asked in unison. Harold came from
Minnesota, where it was great sport. "You know how cows sleep
standing up?" he said. "Well you go out in a pasture where they're
standing around sleeping and give 'em a little nudge (he demonstrated)
and they fall over. Just like dominoes." He chortled wickedly. R.U.
and Lord Nose exchanged one long telling glance.

We argued about whether they were authentic venom-heads all the way home. "Look, Gul-
libleson," said Lord Nose, who tended to patronize me, "that whole thing was a monumental put-
on. Have you lost every shred of critical intelligence?"

"It was not!" I retorted hotly. "I remember tarantula venom from the homeopathic materia
medica. I think it produced chorea or jerking and twitching of the limbs."

"Sounds grand," said Lord Nose, dripping with irony. "And what about the cow-tipping?"

"Oh, that was just to throw us off the scent." Lord Nose could be absolutely maddening at
times. As soon as we got back, I dashed for my materia medica — Boericke's, the bible of the
homeopath, looking rather like a much-thumbed devotional text with its marbled end-papers and
gold stamping. "There it is!" I exclaimed with triumph. "Oh god — listen! This sounds absolutely
tailor-made for the would-be rock magician! 'Remarkable nervous phenomena'," I intoned por-
tentously. (Lord Nose smirked.) " 'Intense sexual excitement.' " (He pricked up his ears.) " 'Las-
civiousness mounting almost to insanity.' "

"Hey. let's see that!" He made a grab for the book while I danced back three steps.

" 'Extreme sensitivity to music.' That's in black letter," 1 said, "That means it's especially im-
portant— like 'mural relaxation'." 1 inflected this heavily lowering my voice an octave. "See,
that's also in black letter! 'Must keep in constant motion. Extraordinary contractions and
movements. Jerking and twitching.' And here under female symptoms: 'vulva hot and dry. Fre-
quent erotic spasms. Pruritis vulvae. Nymphomania.' " As they poured over this last entry, I
grabbed Kent's Materia Medica from the shelf. Kent, the dean of American homeopaths, was
canon. "Look — 'great fantastic dancing,' it says. 'Desire to run about, to dance and jump up and
down.' "

"Hey, where do I get some of this stuff?"

"Look, it isn't all positive," I cautioned. "Listen to these symptoms: 'excessive hyperesthesia,
burning sensations, fox-like cunning and destructiveness. violence with anger, precordial an-
guish, sensation as if the heart twisted and turned around.' "

"Well, is there an antidote?"

"I'm not sure there is. I think you have to dance it off — that's what the tarantella was all about.
Look at what Kent says right here at the beginning — quote: 'This terrible poison should never be
used except in attenuations.' "

"Well if it's such a terrible poison, how can they smoke it before every performance?"

MODE

ROCK I

Alison I

NTTISMO

I THE

UN-DAY

KAGICIAN

[Kennedy

"I don'l know. They're young. They're resilient... Maybe the pyrolytic products are less toxic.
Anyway, smoking it, you could calibrate the dosage better. I bet this stuff's been used in certain
rarified rock milieux for years. Listen to what they call the 'physiognomy': 'the face shows a
pale earthy hue. Eyes are wide, shining and staring, with a look almost of terror. Inflamed parts
are dark red or purplish and swollen. Throbbing carotids are seen in the neck.' You know. I bet
Keith Richard was into it. Or— hey!— remember Dylan's Tarantula'"

"You mean his novel?"

"Prose poem."

"Whatever."

"Do you suppose?..."

"Come on, Queen Mu!"

"No really\ Remember, it was at the galley proof stage with MacMillan back in '66 when
Dylan took it back after his so-called motorcycle accident'." I traced elaborate quotation marks
in the air festooning 'motorcycle accident'.

"Where do you get all this?"

"Oh, it was in all the papers — he got an injunction and they fought it out in the courts until '71
when they finally succeeded in publishing it but not without — rumor had it — deleting certain
'sensitive material.' You know, we never heard about that accident at the time — it was all about
six months after the fact. I bet it was a colossal cover-up."

"But didn't he break his back?"

"Supposedly — in three places. His neck, too. But he could have done that on tarantula venom.
Gone into clonic spasm. Opisthotonus, they call it. You can flip your back out, arch back so far
that..."

"Alison, you're quite quite mad you know! But we love you anyway." R.U. was shaking his
head in mock concern; Lord Nose was moving to leave. The hour was going on three.

"You know, Weberman never believed in his motorcycle accident. He thought it was a cover
for some drug overdose. He just didn't know what it was!" I called after them — but they were al-
ready out the door, elaborately miming my galloping dementia as they disappeared down the
steps.

In the next few weeks, I threw myself into the tarantula literature. One fascinating account fol-
lowed another. There were the studies of choreomanias like St. John's Dance, St. Vitus' Dance,
St. Guy's Dance — all with overlapping symptoms, the precise clinical entity or pathology un-
known— more often the disease was put down (by modern authorities) to "sympathetic con-
tagion" or mass hysteria. Sometimes it was viewed as a festival of license, the "chorea lascivia"
as Paracelsus called it. Some thought it a recrudescence of bacchantic rites that had gone under-
ground for centuries. Checking first in that treasury of occult lore and learning, Lynn
Thorndike's History of Ma^ic and Experimental Science, 1 found at least a dozen references in
volume 8 — it was all the rage in the seventeenth century. As a subject for learned discourse, I
mean. Everyone who was anyone pronounced on it — Cardano. Borrichius, C'ampanella, Baglivi,
Athanasius Kircher — why Kircher even wrote three entirely different accounts of it. in Phonur-
gia Nova. Musurgia Universalis, and Magnes, sive Ars Magnetka. He, like the others, was fas-
cinated by its bizarre symptomatology and its implications for the understanding of magnetism,
music and healing — the preoccupations of both the Pythagorean and Orphic schools.

Augustus Hare described tarantism as he found it in the boot of Italy, early in this century: "...
An epidemic of melancholy madness, which pervaded the women of Apulia, ending in frenzies
like those of hydrophobia and frequently in death, was believed to proceed from the bite of the
tarantula, chiefly because the disease appeared at the season when this spider woke up to its
summer life. It was believed that music was the best means of giving relief to the tarantulati, in-
citing them to dance and causing them to throw off the poison of the tarantola in perspiration.
The patient, dressed in white and crowned with flowers, used to be led out into the garden by her
friend, and the musicians in attendance would play the air of the tarantella, which the "taran-
tolata" would follow, only leaving one partner after another until she finally fell down exhausted,
when a pail of cold water was thrown on her, and she was put to bed. The epidemic of Apulia,
and the belief in the tarantula bite, spread over the whole of Italy, till regular fetes were ap-
pointed for the cure, which received the name of 'camaveletti delle donne'."

*

That redoubtable Englishwoman, Janet Ross, late Victorian aristocratic eccentric who travel-
led throughout Sicily and Otranto querying after local folklore, left us a marvelously vivid ac-
count of the phenomenon as she found it in the 1880's. Tarantism had long since become in-
stitutionalized and was seen as a peculiarly female syndrome, probably because it was women
who tended to get bitten while picking grapes or harvesting grain. Men, too, however are recor-
ded as having been accidently poisoned while greedily eating grapes (tarantulas hide in bunches
of grapes to build up their internal heat which strengthens the poison) or bitten in the earlobe
while sleeping on the ground.

Janet Ross's account, like so many, emphasizes the particular susceptibility of women: "I as-
ked Don Eugenio also about the famous tarantola... (He) told me he had witnessed hundreds of
cases. 'There are various species of the insect' (he said) 'of different colors and two different
kinds of "tarantismo", the wet and the dry; the women in the fields are the most liable to be bit-
ten, because they wear so little clothing on account of the intense heat. A violent fever is the
beginning of the disease. The person bitten sways backwards and forwards, moaning violently.
Musicians are called, and if the tune does not strike the fancy of the "tarantata" (the person who
has been bitten), she moans louder, crying "No! No! Basta! Not that air." The fiddler instantly
changes, and the tambourine beats fast and furious to indicate the tempo. At last the "tarantata"
approves of the tempo, and springing up, begins to dance frantically.

Her friends try to find out the colour of the "tarantola" that has bitten her. and adorn her dress
and her wrists with ribbons of the same tint as the insect: blue, green or red. If no one can indi-
cate the proper color, she is decked with streamers of every hue which flutter wildly about her as
she dances and tosses her arms in the air. They generally begin the ceremony indoors, but it often
ends in the street, on account of the heat and the concourse of people. When the "tarantata" is
quite worn out she is put into a warm bed and sleeps, sometimes for eighteen hours at a stretch.
If it is a case of wet tarantismo, the musicians sit near a well, to which the "tarantata" is irresis-
tably attracted. While she is dancing, relays of friends deluge her with water.'

Don Eugenio went on to describe an autocratic master-mason who vehemently rejected the
reality of tarantismo and put it down to female malingering or hysteria. As luck or San Cataldo
would have it, he himself was bitten and in his frenzy tore down his doors and was soon seen
jumping about in the streets crying "Hanno ragion' la femmine! Hanno ragion' la femmine!"
(The women are right! The women are right! ) (The Land of Manfred. London, 1 889)
Extract from the book Tarantismo
to be published by High Frontiers,
Summer 1 987 continued on page .W

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2012 with funding from

R. U. Sirius Archives / Mondo 2000 History Project

http://archive.org/details/tarantismomodern03quee

continued from page 33

High Frontiers interviewed Alison Kennedy (alias Alison Wonder-
loud or Queen Mu) in her aerie in the Berkeley lulls. The room was
full of divine clutter: stai ks oj waxes, pylons of books bristling with
multicolored markers. She seemed somewhat less manic than when
we'd last seen her. She had sedated herself she confided, for the or-
deal. Brandy'.' we wondered. Tryptophane9 Valerian root with tincture
of glow worm''

High Frontiers: Great opening! I expected something turgid and dry
from those stacks of xeroxes you've amassed. But didn't you doctor it
a bit - use a little literary licence'

Alison: Not at all! That's precisely how the whole thing unfolded. In
fact, I had no idea what I was dealing with when I first stumbled on
this Orphic gold mine — the vastness of it, it's extraordinary ramili-
cations. I just thought: "What a great little bagatelle this would make
for High Frontiers. I'll knock it off in a week and go back to my Great
Work — which was sting-rays.
H.F.: And that was a year ago'.'

AK: Just over — September 31, 1985, and I've been hot on the trail
ever since. At first the aspect that fascinated me was its link with an-
cient female ecstatic rites — rites that have survived into this century
and have in fact been fully and richly documented by ethnomusi-
cologists — though not in the English language. Ernesto de Martino in
La Terra del Rimorso did a magnificent job collecting all the history
and folklore which he integrated with documentary coverage of its
present-day survivals in Apulia — the heel of the boot of Italy. The ex-
orcistic ritual associated with the bite is performed annually on the
feast day of St. Paul under Church auspices and is attended by
hundreds of men and women, especially adolescent boys and girls.

I. M Lewis has described this "macabre cultural construct" where
the libertine spider is identified with the ascetic apostle in Ecstatic
Religion. They summon the saint with the invocation "My Saint Paul
of the Tarantists who pricks the girls in their vaginas, my Saint Paul of
the Serpents who pricks the boys in their testicles."
H.F.: Weird stuff! And you say this goes back to Dionysus?
AK: Actually, J. F. Gmelin, back in 1795 appears to have been the first
to suggest that this rite was a survival of ancient Bacchantic orgies.
The women saved their pocket money all year and made white gowns
that were perfect replicas of ancient Greek off-the-shoulder maenad
gowns, wore coloured streamers tied to their upper arms which flut-
tered wildly as they danced, their hair streaming loose and their heads
thrown back in ecstasy — exactly as maenads are depicted on Greek
vases. Incidentally Patti Smith, one tarantula venom initiate, is depic-
ted wearing just such a gown in the pages of Babel. They hired
itinerant musicians to play with the money they'd saved for festivals
known as "carnaveletti delle donne."
H.F.: So this was a peculiarly female institution?
AK: Well, that's what I thought at first. But now I believe that there
are three separate strands of tradition — the female ecstatic rites, the
gay Orphic poetic tradition, connected with both seership and the sal-
timbanques, and the Gypsy love magic and "cante jondo" tradition —
popularly known as "Deep Song" or flamenco.
H.F.: It sounds like this spider is found all over the place.
AK: Well, there are many sub-species of Lycosa tarentula — narbonen-
sis, radiata, hispanica, infemalis, etc. and these are found all through
the circum-Mediterannean area and near East. There are also other
spiders — the mygale for example, or the spiderlike arachnid known as
Galeodes, the Arza in Sardinia, and even an ant, Mutilla calva. These
all produce similar syndromes — profound prostration followed by an
exaltation of the nervous system, lascivious dancing, emotional
dithyrambs, possession states. All spider poisons profoundly affect the
nervous system — possibly because of the ATP in spider venom.. The
Galeodes found in North Africa seems to be the gadfly or gadbee of
antiquity — the oestros which caused the "rutting madness" in
women — though others have identified it as a kind of Tabanus or
horsefly. It's all very confusing — the ancients didn't think in the same
strict taxonomic categories as we and the word "tarantula" was applied
to any number of critters. The phenomenon itself has been in-
stitutionalized differently in each culture — different names, different
cures, different functionalist explanations. In Ethiopia or Abyssinia for
example, it is know as "Tigretier" or "Tigretismo" and the venom is
smoked on hemp in secret cultic rites — by women, the Zars, certain
orgiastic Sufi orders. In Andalusia, in Southern Spain, it was used
clandestinely by gypsies in love philtres; in the hoda gitana or Gypsy
wedding fiesta, as an ingredient along with menstrual blood in the
wedding cake to be consumed by bride and groom; and the blood of
the tarantula consumed by Flamenco dancers and musicians to invoke
the "duende" or powerful tellurian energy that wells up through the
soles of the feet inspiring the most impassioned displays of technical
virtuosity and "soul".

H.F.: Before we go any further, maybe you could recapitulate the ef-
fects of tarantula venom for our readers. I know you go into much
greater detail in the book, but what does T.V. produce besides intense
sexual excitation'.'

AK: Oh. that's just the beginning. You might say that it releases the
Kundalini fire. It's a powerful spinal nervous system stimulant — like
strychnine, aconite or panther gall bladder. It produces a manic-depres-
sive syndrome to the nth degree and an extraordinary excitation of the
special senses — sound, music, color, odor — as well as synesthesia. It
moves up successively through the chakras, producing a really amaz-
ing heightening of the emotions reminiscent of "Adam" or the
phenethylamine tribe — only with tarantula venom you've got both the
agony and the ecstasy — anguish and rapture, a little hell to harrow

before you enter into the gates of horn.
H.F.: What are the gales of horn'.'

AK: The gates of horn gave one access to viridical dreams, prophetic
knowledge. But, as Rimbaud said in one of his Voyant letters, "Les
souffrances sont enormes" — The sufferings are immense — "All forms
of love, of suffering, of madness... he exhausts within himself all the
poisons. Unspeakable torments, where he will need the greatest faith, a
superhuman strength, where he becomes the great invalid, the great
criminal, the great accursed, and the Supreme Scientist!... So what if
he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, un-
nameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the
horizons where the first has fallen!"
H.F.: It doesn't sound particularly recreational!
AK: Well, tarantula venom is incredibly toxic stuff. Lautreamont kil-
led himself on it and Rimbaud effectively burnt out his poetic daemon.
But then again, all the phenethylamines should be used with the
greatest circumspection as well. They drain your marrow — what the
Greeks call muelos, the life stuff, the vital flame. Rimbaud was cons-
cious of how toxic it was — "I'm crapping myself up as much as pos-
sible," he wrote. "I say that one must be a seer, one must make oneself
a seer, through a long, immense, and calculated disordering of all the
senses.

H.F.: Sounds rugged!

AK: It is — but that was central to the Orphic notion of the poet's mis-
sion— and personal calvary. It was thought that the soul had to be tem-
pered or perfected through extreme states of suffering. A commonly
occuring emblem for the alchemical stage known as the "nigredo" was
the crowned heart transpierced by swords. Eliphas Levi places great
stress on the idea also. There's a great quote in his History of Magic,
"Learn how to suffer and learn how to die — such are the gymnastics of
eternity and such is the immortal novitiate."

"The gymnastics of eternity" is a telling phrase in view of the cult of
the saltimbanque in the work of many Orphic poets — Rimbaud, Rilke,
Lorca. The poet was seen, in the French Romantic tradition, as taking
great risks — as being a high-wire artist, as narrowly escaping the jaws
of death. Poets consorted with jugglers and acrobats in the old Corn-
media dell' Arte days of Theophile Gautier. The surrealists, Picasso,
Apollinaire and Rilke, hung out with the trapeze artists of the Cirque
Medrano on the outskirts of Paris and immortalized them in their
work. "Let's be like them!" cried Rilke. "Let's never fall without
dying!" This whole notion of the poet as daredevil artist is alien to us
in the English-speaking world bred on the pablum of the poet as effete,
limp wristed and phthisical.

H.F.: Well, do you think acrobats also used tarantula venom''
AK: It's occured to me. I wonder just how far its secret use has spread.
Certainly from the descriptions of its effects on the nervous system —
the superhuman grace, timing and flexibility that are associated with
it — would commend it to the performer. Edward Topsell, for example,
in his classic "History of the Four Footed Beasts..." says that those
bitten by the tarantula "dance so well, with such good grace and
measure, and sing so sweetly as though they had spent all their lives in
some dancing and singing school!" And, of course, the homeopathic
reports always mention "contortionistic body movements" as a prime
symptom along with "great fantastic dancing."
H.F.: Well. I can see how it would make for some dazzling stage
magic.

AK: It's hard to know how many rock performers have been into the
stuff. Harold thought Jimi Hendrix might have used it. Any rock
musicians who hung out in Marrakech might conceivably have run
into it. Patti Smith definitely was into it at one point. On Radio
Ethiopia she writes "the drug that surrounds the heart, the pipe that
lies on its side still bums" and sings: "Oh, I see your stare/ it's spiral-
ing up there/ up through the center of my brain/ baby come/ baby go/
and free the hurricane oh i go to the center of the airplane/ baby got a
beat in the center of the ring/ and my heart is pumping/ and my fists
are pumping" — almost a clinical description of tarantula venom in-
toxication, with its emphasis on the heart symptoms. "Release
(Ethiopium) is the drug... an animal howl says it all," she writes on the
back of the album, and takes as the leitmotif for the whole album
Breton's "Beauty will be convulsive or not at all."
H.F.: Did her venom use start with Ethiopia?

AK: Oh, no. There are many allusions in her book Babel — at least b
'73 she was using it. "The Stream" and "Saba the Bird" are aboi
venom initiation. In "Neo Boy" she writes: "The long animal cry
woman is blessed, the perfect merging of beauty and beasl, the greei
gas moving in like excitement... a woman alone in a tube of sound
resound is resounding, a long low whine moving through the spine."
H.F.: What can you tell us about the artist as outcast, as pariah''
AK: Of course, that's a favorite theme of Patti Smith's taken fron
Rimbaud. Rimbaud referred to tarantula venom as "merde" (eatinj
merde was the code word for T.V. in letters to Verlaine.) He was cons
cious of its' being polluting as well as sacred, as being totally beyom
the pale, beyond the understanding of petit bourgeois society. He cal
led himself "the hyena" (the hyena eats shit as well as carrion and, fo
good measure, was said to be hermaphroditic); in other words, th
most glorious taboo breaker of them all. His friends were called th
"oestros" and "the toad's friend." Patti Smith called the artist a n
(anagram of art) or after Rimbaud — a nigger — "the great accursed
And Lautreamont had a whole host of epithets for himself drawn froi
the natural history realm.

H.F.: Didn't you say Garcia Lorca was into the stuff'.'
AK: Well, there is a great deal of internal evidence in his poetry th;
he was. He began studying flamenco guitar with two old gypsy mastei
in the Sacro Monte outside Granada at the age of 17. His extraordinar
personal charm and seductiveness may have led one of them to "tur
him on" to tarantula venom — even though, normally, no payo woul
have been let in on it. He helped de Falla organize the first Festival c
Cante Jondo only a few years later — the woodcut emblazoned on th
program cover features, among other emblems of cante jondo, a tarar
tula in the lower left hand comer. The central icon is the hea
transfixed by swords with an eye in the center crying tears of blood-
markedly similar to the eye in the heart in certain of Athanasius Kii
cher's cosmograms or in Sufi emblems. It seems to symbolize lovin
compassion or the wisdom of the heart bom of soul suffering.
H.F.: Do you have any actual evidence that the gypsies turned him on
AK: No, quite frankly it's all wild surmise. It might have been Manui
Torres, with his "black torso of the Pharaoh." Or another possibilit
which fits in with the tradition of older gay Orphic poets turning o
promising younger poets, is the Count of Miraflores de los Angelc
whom he met at the Gongora Festival in Seville. He seems to have ha
all prerequisites for a T.V. habitue: he was a magician, theosophis
hypnotist, poet, and Allumbrado. But really tracing the chain c
transmission is a fairly futile (if entertaining) exercize.
H.F.: Sometimes these things aren t passed on in a linear way at all. .
AK: Precisely! Did Dali get it from Lorca or did he get it from the A
lumbrados and Lorca through the gypsies? All we know is, in Spain ;
least, it's use was closely related to the cante jondo tradition — "Dee
Song" — the soleares and siguiriyas and the cult of the duende. Lore;
in his famous lecture on "The Theory and Function of the Duende
lists a few of the poets who had a "duende" — that is a daemon or earth
goblin that courses through them producing what's called the furc
poeticus. Listen to this quote: "To help us seek the duende there i
neither map nor discipline. All one knows is that it bums the blood lik
powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet gcometr
one has learned, that it compels Goya to paint with his knees and wit
his fists horrible bitumen blacks. Or that it leaves Mossen Cinto Vei
daguer naked in the cold air of the Pyrenees... that it dresses the deli
cate body of Rimbaud in an acrobat's green suit; or that it puts the eye
of a dead fish on Count Lautreamont in the early morning Boulevard.'
H.F.: Didn't you say that Lautreamont was another initiate'
AK: Well, it was actually this very quote from Lorca that alerted me t
the possibility. I already had plenty of evidence for Rimbaud's use b
the time I stumbled on this reference, and I had always wondered wh
Lautreamont had been taken up and practically divinized by the sui
realists. So I began going through his major work fairl
meticulously — Les Chants de Maldoror, and there in the fifth chant,
hit paydirt.

H.F.: Perhaps we should mention that Maldoror is considered the mas
terpiece of fin-de-siecle morbidity.
AK: And mortality!
H.F.: And dark humor.. .

AK: And revolt! It's gratuitously grotesque — like grand guignol, he'
trying to "gross out" the reader.

H.F.: But funny as hell! It was embraced by the Surrealists an>
Lautreamont seen as some kind of martyr.
AK: Actually, a swan. Lorca was also called a swan.
H.F.: A swan'.'

AK: Swan, cisne, was one of the epithets for Orpheus. Orpheus, yoi
know, was reincarnated as a swan — after his severed head sailed ti
Lesbos prophesying all the way — a favorite decadent art theme. Bretoi
called Lautreamont "the swan of Montevideo" and boasted, "I havi
access to him as a convulsionary."
H.F.: So I suppose Breton is another T.V. initiate.
AK: I was getting to that! — Poisson Soluble is, of course, a play oi
"Poison soluble" and it's packed with venom references.
H.F.: But back to Lautreamont!

AK: You know he composed all these poems late at night declaiminj
loudly to the accompaniment of a piano, quite Pierrot Lunaire. He ma;
have been constitutionally melancholic, but his work more than an;
other exemplifies the "depraved fancy" sometimes associated wit!
tarantula venom. Baglivi says "many have sought the sepulchre an<
lonely places, and even extended themselves upon the bier. Desperats
they court dissolution... The restraints of modesty being loosed, the;
sigh deeply, howl, make indecent gestures, expose their sexual or

©

ontinued on page 4.

continued from page 59

gans... others like to strike whips on the buttocks, heels, feet, back,
etc.. Also strange fancies in regard to colours are observed..." —
Anyway, in the fifth "chant," about the slaying of the eidolon or
double, he refers explicitly to the spider's magnetic spell over his
cerebro-spinal nervous system going on nearly two lustra (or ten years)
and twice he refers to this spider specifically as a tarantula.
H.F.: But how can all these Ph.D. lit. oil. types have missed this?
AK: Ah. but they lack angelic guidance! Once you have the key... you
know Rimbaud was always boasting about having the key. "Only 1
have the key to this savage parade!" he cried. And: "I am an inven-
tor., a musician, even, who has found something that may be the key
to love." But it is in Une Saison en Enfer that he gives the most sus-
tained blow-by-blow description of tarantula venom intoxication, "To
drink strong drink, as strong as molten ore," he cries. "My heart has
been stabbed by grace. Ah! I hadn't thought this would happen... I
may die of earthly love, die of devotion... Ah! my lungs burn, my
temples roar! My heart... my arms and legs... Fire! Fire at me! Here!
I'll give myself up! I'll kill myself! I'll throw myself beneath the
horses' hooves! Ah!... I'll get used to it." This last suggests that he
had consciously undertaken this ordeal, that this was the first of a
series of Orphic "investigations" (his word) that summer at Roche in
the old granary where his mother and sister Vitalie pressed their ears
against the doors to hear the passionate cries within — a poetomachia
of one!

H.F.: Is that recorded somewhere'!

AK: Yes— it's in Vitalie's journal. He shut himself up in the granary
for weeks, writing A Season in Hell and all they heard of him were
"moans, sobs, cries of rage, oaths, blasphemies and jeers." In "A Night
in Hell" he actually opens by saying "J'ai ovale une fameuse gorgee
de poison" — "I've just swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison" — and
goes on to record meticulously the physical and psychological effects
of the venom. "My entrails are on fire. The violence of the venom
twists my arms and legs, deforms me, drives me to the ground. I die of
thirst, I suffocate, I cannot cry. This is Hell, eternal torment! See how
the fire rises! I bum as I must... A man who wants to mutilate himself
is certainly damned, isn't he?" And he goes on ranting and expostulat-
ing. Then: "My hallucinations are endless... I shall say no more about
this; poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am the richest one of all,
a thousand limes, and I will hoard it like the sea. Oh God — the clock
of life stopped but a moment ago. I am no longer within the world.
Theology is certainly accurate; hell is certainly down below — and
heaven is up on high. Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep, is a nest of flames. . . 1
will tear the veils from every mystery — mysteries of religion or of na-
ture, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony and nothingness. I
am a master of phantasmagoria. Listen! Every talent is mine!... Shall I
give you Afric chants, belly dancers? Shall I vanish. Shall I dive after
the ring'!... Shall I? I will make gold, and medicines... Put your faith
in me. then; faith comforts, it guides and it heals. Come unto me all of
you — even the little children — let me console you, let me pour out my
heart for you — my miraculous heart'." This fearful gamut of emotions
is typical of tarantula venom intoxication — the messianizing, the gran-
diosity, the sweeping cosmic dioramas. Having experienced something
of this myself, on a combination of adam, 2CB, and acid, I immediate-
ly recognized the utter authenticity of it. Rimbaud goes on in his
Delires II: Alchimie du Verhe to describe quite methodically, how he
went about forging a new poetic language of all the senses. "I began it
as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was
unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still." In
the section "Faim," he speaks of the "bindweed's (morning glory's)
gay venom." Significantly, in the recently published hrouillon or rough
draft, I found that it was a spider, in fact "the Romantic spider"
(laraignee romantique) — that he had originally written but that he
substituted "morning glory" in the published form.

"Heureuse la taupe, sommeil de tome la virginite!" he cries. "Happy
the mole, slumber of (ritual) virginity!" L'Herhe a la taupe is Datura
and mole's hearts eaten were said in Pliny to confer the gift of
prophecy. He goes on to describe the damage to his nervous system:
"It affected my health. Terror loomed ahead. I would fall again and
again into a heavy sleep, which lasted several days at a time, and get-
ting up I continued with the same sad dreams: I was ripe for death and
my weakness led me down dangerous roads to the edge of the world,
and of Cimmeria, home of whirlwinds and darkness." And worst of all,
he mourns the loss of that animating force in human existence: Desire.
H.F .: Ah. Desire. / imagine this brings us back to Dylan.
AK: Precisely! It is, in fact, the album on which Dylan most clearly
spells out his use of tarantula venom. The album cover features Dylan
dressed in the manner of a young Rom — the gypsy look he favored
during The Rolling Thunder Tour. In the liner notes he himself wrote
he says "Where do I begin... on the heels of Rimbaud moving like a
dancing bullet through the hot New Jersey night filled with venom and
wonder."

H.F.: But surely that's figurative?

AK: That's what Dylan's counting on us assuming. Dylan's got a lot
of hubris, but he doesn't really want to give it away.
H.F.: But still, I haven't heard anything really unambiguous.
AK: Oh, you want something unambiguous? Well, then there's Rim-
baud's Poison Perdu ("Forgotten Poison") published and authenticated
by Verlaine in La Cravache in 1 888 but, strangely, left out of almost
every edition of his work since.

The opening stanzas describe a typical Pierrot Lunaire scene of
taking tea on the balcony under the moonlight. Stanza three says:
"Pricked into the edge of the blue curtain shines a pin with a head of
gold, like a large insect that sleeps. The point of the pin is tempered

or quenched ("trempee") in a sharp poison. I take you — be prepared
for me at the hours of the desires of death."
H.F. What does the pin symbolize''

AK: I don't think it's symbolic at all. I think it was used to draw blood
from the tarantula. Lorca uses it similarly only it's an old rusty pin in-
stead of a gold-headed pin. In "Double Poem of Lake Eden" he cries:
"Horned dwarf, let me pass through to the wood of yawnings and
stretchings and exhilarated jumps. For I know the most secret use of an
old rusty pin and I know the horror of wide open eyes in the tangible
surface of the dish."
H.F. Who's the horned dwarf'

AK: The duende of course, and it's a rusty pin because rust had occult
meaning to the gypsies, and the dish probably referred to
lecanomancy — divination through gazing at a basin of water.
H.F .: Most ingenious. But is it true?

AK: Well, probably only Philip Cummings could say for sure. He's
the young American poet Lorca had met at the Residencia in Madrid
and was visiting at Lake Eden — his family cabin. He's now just over
eighty and still going strong And though I talked to him yesterday on
the telephone, I hesitated somehow to broach the subject of spider
venom!

H.F. What makes you think he would know?

AK: The poems written at that period were clearly written under the
influence of tarantula venom. Look at Cielo Vivo or Danza de la
Muerte. Also, Lorca wrote Angel del Rio from Eden Mills: "Hidden
among the ferns I found a distaff covered with spiders... Cognac is ur-
gent for my poor heart." He must have taken a supply back to New
York City for he writes, "The mask! Lo, the mask! Spitting wilderness
venom over New York's imperfect despair!" Many people have com-
pared Lorca's Poet in New York with Rimbaud's Saison en Enfer. John
Crow describes his mode of working in those months — and it's strik-
ingly reminiscent of Lautreamont: "When he settled down to write
poetry in the early morning hours of New York after midnight it was
with the strained voice, the high key, the midnight fervours of nostal-
gia burning deep in the darkness. And the picture was no salutory
sight." "With an A and an E and an / knifing into my throat" cried Lor-
ca. "I am a wounded pulse probing what lies on the other side." And
after the paroxysms of the night, whether spent in love-making or
poetic composition, the prostration of the dawn — "the desires of
death" — see "He died at Dawn" or Rimbaud's Matinee d'lvresse
("This poison will stay in our veins even when, as the fanfares depart,
we return to our former disharmony") and the physical exhaustion and
neuro-endrocine depletion where he's left as immobile as a statue (see
"Longing of a Statue").

H.F '.: But you said he began taking tarantula venom years before —
AK: Yes, but it reached a crescendo in the savage surrealism of "A
Poet in New York". He must have tried it at least by 1920 for he writes
then of "spider of silence, spider of oblivion" and was early fascinated
by the insect world — something he had in common with Rimbaud and
Lautreamont who were weaned on Dr. Chenu's "Encyclopedic
Naturelle." Lorca's first play The Butterfly's Evil Spell was all about
cockroaches! And the cicada was a favorite metaphor for those artists
who exploded in heavenly sound and light. "Let my heart be a cicada,"
he cries "Let it die, singing slowly, wounded by the blue heaven." In
his lecture on "Cante Jondo" he writes of the great cantaores burning
themselves out: "They were immense interpreters of the popular heart,
who destroyed their own hearts, among the storms of feeling. Almost
all of them died a death of the heart, that is they exploded like enor-
mous cicadas." So the fascination was there with the whole
phenomenology of the soul, states of poetic rapture, extreme states of
passion and madness all associated with insects. Plato in Phaedrus
speaks of the four forms of divine madness: poetic madness, Bacchic-
madness, prophetic madness and the madness of love and it is the
whole panoply that we get with tarantula venom.
H.F.: In the book, you say that Lorca made a surrealistic film about
his tarantula venom trips.

AK: Yes, he wrote the silent film scenario called "Trip to the Moon".
He teamed up with a young Mexican film maker, Emilio Amero,
whom he met in New York. Lorca had been devastated by Bunuel
supplanting him in Dali's affections (that was the crise de coeur in

1928 that prompted his trip to New York.) He had seen "Un chien An-
dalou" which Bunuel and Dali collaborated on and must have decided
to go them one better. All the favorite Lorca themes are here: the boy
in the saltimbanque suit, the Gypsy spook Roelejunda crying tears of
blood, the moon emerging from a skull, fish palpitating in agony,
frogs, close ups of male and female sexual parts. The protagonist, the
thunderstruck man with veins painted on his body, must have been
Lorca himself on tarantula venom — his "trip to the moon" (he repor-
tedly made six "trips to the moon" in this period). And the name
"Elena, Helena" that flashes on the screen and fades into screams must
surely refer to Helena Diakonoff, or "Gala" who had, by that time,
definitively supplanted him as Dali's great love. Frustrated love is the
dominant theme.

H.F.: Fascinating! I'd never heard of this film.
AK: Few people have. The Spanish original is still Amero's posses-
sion. He would probably know — wherever he is — about Lorca's taran-
tula venom habit. Cummings must have known but we can bet he
wouldn't tell us — not the man who destroyed the packet of
manuscripts Lorca entrusted him with the admonition to keep them
safe. We'll never know what they contained because he destroyed
them as soon as he heard of the poet's death — after first reading them.
"They were dreadful," he said laconically. "I burned them."
H.F.: What a crime. But surely there's some other link.
AK: Well, of course Dali knows all. If only Vanity Fair had asked
about tarantula venom instead of the Rape of Europa. Lorca was madly
in love with Dali from their student days at the Residencia. As Dali
said in a recent interview: "Lorca was in love with me — you know
this? He had this tremendous love of only men and Dali is very young,
and beautiful, and he's crazy about me! Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!"
H.F.: How Daliesque! Where' d you get that?
AK: In Explosion of the Swan, an interview published by Black Spar-
row Press. And here's a picture of them at the beach. They spent
several summers together at Cadaques but in 1928 Bunuel usurped him
in Dali's affections and he plunged into a deep depression — he was
particularly stung by Dali's calling his work retrogressive. This
depression reached a climax in the spring of 1929 when he joined a
religious brotherhood, the Confradia de Santa Maria de la Alhambra.
In Holy Week he actually headed the procession of penitents in
Granada, wearing a hooded penitential robe and carrying the cross!
H.F.: Holy Toledo!

AK: (laughs) No, but close. Of course, he was innately extravagant
and manic-depressive. Most people remember him as a charmer,
gentle, sympatico, always "on", but Dali describes another side of Lor-
ca: "The poetic phenomenon in its entirety and 'in the raw' presented
itself before me in flesh and bone, confused, blood-red, viscous and
sublime, quivering with a thousand fires of darkness and subterranean
biology."

H.F.: So you think they were exploring this world of subterranean
biology together?

AK: I think that's inevitable — though of course Dali would never ad-
mit to an exogenous source of inspiration. "I don't take hal-
lucinogens!" he cried. "I am a hallucinogen!" But his surreal universe;
his paintings for Les Chants de Maldoror, the "blood is sweeter than
honey" first Communion incident from The Secret Life; the painting
"Spider in the Afternoon"; an article that appeared in 1941 in the
Richmond Times-Dispatch. "Spiders — that's what fascinates Dali
most about Virginia," all argue to the contrary.
H.F.: How did they take it?

AK: Lorca refers repeatedly to a pin: "the most secret use of an old
rusty pin" or "On a pin's point my love is spinning!" I think they were
puncturing the dorsum of the spiders' abdomen lightly with a pin — and
the blood or hemolymph would spurt out without permanently injuring
the spider. The hemolymph of spiders is green — blueish green when
fresh oxidizing to brownish green — because the hemocyanin molecule
is based on copper instead of iron as in mammals. The meaning of the
line most often identified with Lorca — and yet puzzlingly cryptic —
"Verde que te quiero verde" — "Green how I want you green" — in the
Somnambular Ballad is now patently obvious.
H.F.: And you've got the patent on hemolymph extraction?
AK: Oh, I'd never do it! — It's simply too toxic to the heart. It's
probably what did Jim Morrison in.
H.F.: Really1

AK: No, that's just a wild rumor! My wild rumor. But he's fairly Or-
phic and a great admirer of Rimbaud's.

H.F.: You keep using the word Orphic and though it's pretty late in the
game, could you explain what you mean by it'?
AK: Ah, orphism. This could be never-ending. John Warden says that
given the will and ingenuity, anything can be shown to be Orphic. As a
myth, it contains dozens of sub-motifs: the magician-poet who can
tame the forces of nature, the descent into Hades, the loss of the
beloved, the last minute breaking of a taboo, the dismemberment by
incensed rampaging females (like Pentheus), the decapitated oracular
head, the power to charm beasts and cure the bites and stings of
venomous animals: the stellio, the adder and the tarantula. One inter-
esting aspect that has not been sufficiently emphasized is the
mysogynist character of Orpheus (post-Eurydice), the fact that he ad-
dressed himself solely to men (like Robert Bly). Women were forbid-
den to participate in Orphic rites or even enter into the sacred precinct
around his shrine. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Orpheus advocates
pederastic love. But still the most important aspect of the Orpheus
story is his ability to cure through the power of music and sound. 'He
could halt the five archetypal tortures (Tantalus, Ixion, Tityos,
Danaides, Sisyphus) and counteract the madness caused by the siren's

®

song with his more potent music.
II F So Orpheus represents the musician as Healer?
AK: Yes, but not merely a medium or channel; he's a rigorously
trained thaumaturge who uses his mastery of musical tones, modes,
vowel sounds and colours to draw down the different planetary in-
fluences. And as a seer or prophet he was master of the art of divina-
tion through mirrors or basins of water — the encounter with the
double — a higher-octave Narcissus. The psychosomatic effects of the
eight different modes— Phrygian, Lydian, Dorian, etc. is a wist sub-
ject— too vast to go into here. The vibrational affinities between the
vowels, colours, tones and planets goes back to Gnostic incantations
and is described in Empedocles' Purifications and Plato's Charmides,
The seven Greek vowels were magical symbols of the music of the
spheres and were uttered by the initiate to intensify the incantation or
used as amulets. Rimbaud, in his enigmatic Voyelles, combined the
vowels with colours, alchemical symbolism and tarantula imagery to
create a real tour-de-force. "A. black belt, hairy with bursting flies"—
the black belt referring to the characteristic marking on the ventral side
of the tarantula: E, white — sand, the tarantula's habitat; I, crimson —
blood, rage; U. green — divine peace; 0, violet — the angelic or
transcendent. (The last three referring to the qualitatively different
kinds of tarantula venom trips). Rimbaud was preternaturally cons-
cious of his orphic calling from the age of fourteen — and conscious of
the grueling discipline involved. "Careful, mind." he writes in The Im-
possible. "Don't rush madly after salvation. Train yourself!" "La
science que j' entreprends est une science distincte de la poesie," said
Lautreamont in his Poesies.

The soul of Orpheus was thought to successively incarnate in
Homer, Pythagoras. Ennius, then (after a lapse of 1600 years) in Mar-
silio Ficino. Ficino, who wrote The Book of Life, a manual of self-cul-
tivation, and was patronized by Lorenzo de' Medici, played an Orphic
lyre emblazoned with a picture of Orpheus and sang the ancient Or-
phic hymns with incredible sweetness. Cosimo de' Medici invited him
to come down to the villa for the weekend and added "And don't for-
get to bring your lyre when you come." Lorca must certainly have in-
carnated the soul of Orpheus in this century. He wrote: "In a century of
zeppelins and stupid deaths I sob at my piano dreaming of the Han-
delian mist and I create verses very much my own, singing the same to
Christ as to Buddha, to Mohammed, and to Pan. For a lyre I have my
piano and, instead of ink, the sweat of yearning, yellow pollen of my
inner lily and my great love." In the Renaissance, humanitas is defined
as the capacity for love, and the effect of Orpheus' song was to lead
man to love. Love is the power that produces harmony in all things —
Love is "inventive, double-natured, holding the keys to everything."
Double natured, like sacred and profane Venus, like the two musics of
Urania and Polyhymnia. And Orpheus, having suffered to such an ex-
treme, is endowed with the furor gjnatorius which can lead man to a
state of joy.

H.F.: Where is our Orpheus today''

AK: I suspect that he'll come out of the ranks of Rock music. We are
so close to an understanding of music and affective states, music as
healer and purifier. With the incredible sophistication of acoustic tech-
nology, the resources of the Rock Industry, and the surprising intel-
ligence of some of the people within it, it is just a matter of time before
Orpheus' soul incarnates again.

H.F.: There was no mention at all of Orpheus at that "Ritual and Rap-
ture" Conference last month. I "Ritual and Rapture: From Dionysus to
the Grateful Dead" sponsored hy U.C. Berkeley featured mycologist
Joseph Campbell and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.)
AK: I know — I thought that was remarkable! Mickey Hart's writing a
book: On the Edge of Magic, but he's still on the edge. Both he and
Jerry Garcia professed themselves to be essentially mediums. Orphism
is the next stage beyond Dionysiac possession, beyond catharsis. It re-
quires soul-suffering and transcendence, then deep study and ritual
practice.

H.F.: Are you suggesting that rock musicians start hitting the books '
AK: Not necessarily, but there is a fantastic treasury of ancient
manuscripts, housed at the University of Texas at Austin. J*° n L««-
was just telling me about it. He delved into it a bit a few years ago
when he was writing a score for a him on Kepler's "Music of the
Spheres"

H.F '.: What does it contain' Incantations on old mumnn wrappings.
that sort of thing?

AK: Lots of Renaissance musical treatises — survivals and sys-
tematizations of Pythagorean lore. He said there were really bizarre
fantastic things there — charts, anatomical drawings showing different
modes or musical tones streaming through nerve fibers and plexi or
resonating in ventricles: five floors of the stuff; they plundered Europe
after the war, brought it in by the railroad carload. Somebody should
really begin looking seriously at the musical material.
H.F.. -Or frivolously!

AK: Frivolously, even. Also, there's a semi-reformed cranial surgeon
up in Santa Rosa, Joel Alter, who now has a holistic health clinic
where he's working with sonic resonances in healing. He claims that
musical vibrations and vowel sounds produce standing waves in the
cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles that actually mediate the produc-
tion of neuro- hormones.

H.F :. Are there any rock artists who are implementing these dis-
coveries in their music'.'

AK: You tell me. You know the rock scene far better than I. Is anyone
consciously using musical energies in an Orphic way?
H.F.: It's hard to say. You were probably right earlier when you said
that the primary impulse of most rock has been more Dionysian

They're into catharsis, they're into release — release from stress,
sexual frustration, social tensions, whatever. And they're into bac-
i hanalian celebration... .logger, Patti Smith. Jim Morrison all mode
diced references to Dionysianism at one time or another. I'd say most
of the powerful performers these daw arc post modern ironists — like
David Byrne. Bowie, Laurie Anderson— not particularly Orphic. But I
can think oj several people whose works I would check, if I were you,
for Orphic elements... Peter Gabriel. Van Morrison. Todd Rundgren,
Kate Bush...

AK: Oh I loved Kate Bush's Hounds of Love. It's really quite ecstatic.
H.F.: I heard that she incorporated a lot of Gurdjieffs musical
theories in that album They might be hosed on Orphic notions.
AK: One record that impressed me recently — in more ways than one —
was the new double album by This Mortal Coil. It's got some dis-
tinctly Orphic elements to it.

H.F Oh. is that the one you were telling me about with Tarantula on it''
AK: Yes, someone gave me a copy. He'd heard the refrain "Taran-
tula... Tarantula" coming over the airwaves in the dead of night and
leapt out of bed to write down the title. It's called Filigree and
Shadow — doubtless a reference to Moorish architecture. The lyrics
cover all the basic leitmotifs of tarantismo — the shining staring eyes,
(in fact, they're on the cover), the initial numbness or prostration, the
mask, the double, the thunder (Rimbaud's tempete. Lautreamont \
tourbillon, Patti Smith's hurricane), the sense that one's another per-
son— "another person living in a parallel reality" is the way Harold of
the Flying Tarantulas put it, "Je est un autre" were Rimbaud's words.
The first verse runs:

"I'm living but I'm feeling numb.

you can see it in my stare

I wear a mask so closely now

and I don't know who I am

This poison wells inside of me

eroding me away

I've noticed in other eyes

things closing in...

But when the thunder breaks

it breaks for you and me

Tarantula, tarantula"
The last verse ends rather abruptly:

"My world's under a sentence of death

I was born under (grass) clouds

But when the pressure gets too much for me

I bite!

I-I-I-I-I-E-I-E-I-E-l-E-O-O-O-O-O"
This kind of sudden, quirky, animal-like violence is often described
in clinical reports of tarantismo, or of possession states. The "squared
mouth" of the Greek mask of tragedy, the "bouche carree" of
Lautreamont; the characteristic animal howls, and eeriest of all. a
peculiar "yelp" — ... "the stylized cry of the tarantulees, the crisis
cry', an ahiii uttered with various modulations, that sounds more like
the yelping of a dog than a human cry." (Gilbert Rouget, DeMartino).
Darwin has an illuminating discussion of the paroxysms of rage, grief.
terror and joy and how they produce strange involuntary sounds
depending on the different muscle groups powerfully contracted.
H.F.: This is fascinating, and clearly relevant, but is such music or-
phic'.'

AK: Well, it's probably pre-Orphic. Not having looked at those in-
cunabula at Austin, I don't really know what Orphic means. The music
Rimbaud composed on his death bed and played on a hand organ was
probably Orphic.

H.F.: Oh? What's this'.' I've never heard of Rimbaud composing music.
AK: Well, none of it survives unfortunately — we'll never know what it
was like — except that it was described as "supernal fugues of essences
and quintessences." He probably played it to heal himself in those
weeks in Marseilles after they amputated his leg. Anyone who has
even contemplated taking tarantula venom should read his sister
Isabelle's description of those last days — the hellish sufferings, "the
incessant wails and indescribable despair." The most terrible, exquisite
pathos I have ever read — his damnation foreshadowed years earlier:
"Hadn't I once a youth that was lovely, heroic, fabulous — something
to write down on pages of gold?... I was the creator of every feast,

ever) triumph, every drama. 1 tried to invent new flowers, new planets,
new flesh, new languages. I thought that I had acquired supernatural
powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and rm memorii ' What
an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller' I! I called
mysell a magician, an angel, free from all moral constraint!... 1 am
sent back to the soil to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled realit) in
my arn

// /• So, have we said it suffii it ml) loud and . tear vet? For all sou
kids out there in Radioland— Don't, I repeat, do not try tarantula
venom'

AK: It permanently imprints the nervous system with a manic-depres
sive syndrome — and it's probably carcinogenic.
H.F.: There are much belter things out then '
AK: Or on the drafting boards — or the computer simulation modelling
screens Anyway, psycho-nutrition is where it's at! And be sure to tone
up your thymus glands!

H.F. So back to Orpheus — any candidates for Orpheus out there?
AK: Well, being a child ol the sixties. I kind of thought it might be
Dylan. His life follows the typical Orphic pattern — the descent into
Hade., the loss of his wife Sarah, the retirement into the wilds of
Thrace (read upper New York State), and finally this year his resurfac-
ing after the long Rip van Winkle-like hibernation. I thought he might
be about to reveal his "gnawing secret"— the "hydre intime" of taran-
tula venom use — when I heard his 19X6 summer concert tour was cal-
led "True Confessions."
H.F .: Gnawing secret'.'

AK: Well, those were actually Henry Miller's words describing Rim-
baud: "The hydre intime eats away until even the core of one's being
becomes sawdust and the whole body is like unto a temple ol
desolation." Desolation, damnation of the soul- some of the meanings
that have been attached to the "Ten of Swords."
H.F.: That's the name of the new bootleg Dylan album. I wondered
where that came from.

AK: Significantly, out on Tarantula Records. Dylan seems to have a
very loyal and protective entourage, but clearly somebody out there
knows. Patti Smith in Babel writes "Have you seen dylans dog.' it got
wings, it can fly, if you speak of it to him, it's the only time dylan
can't look you in the eye."

H.F.: But damnation of the soul'.' Isn't that a bit strong'.'
AK: Well, he said in Tarantula that he'd made a Faustian pact with the
devil to get away from Middle America. The gypsies atttach a par-
ticularly malign significance to the ten of swords. In Crowley's Book
of Tholh, it is ruled by the sun in Gemini: (Dylan's sign) and
represents "the culmination of unmitigated energy... the ruin of the In-
tellect and even of all mental and moral qualities."
H.F . I don't see any evidence of ruined intellect.
AK: Look, I'm just quoting. The card itself is reminiscent of the
pierced heart in alchemical and cante jondo symbolism — anguish, dis-
solution. Rachel Pollack has the best discussion of it. "You are physi-
cally ruined by the intensity," she writes in The 7H Degrees oj \\ isdom
"Your mind has been stretched to its outer limit... The 10 swords in a
man's body including one in his ear suggest hysteria and the idea 'no
one has ever suffered as much as me'." "Non est dolor sicut dolor
meus": Dylan has written this in many ways especially in his born-
again lyrics.

H.F.: Oh. have you found evidence in his lyrics?...
AK: Look. I'm into grand synthesis — not minute textual exegesis! But
there are a few things — "I know all about poison. I know all about
fiery darts" he says in "What Can I Do For You?" In "Where Are You
Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)" he says: "The truth was
obscure, too profound and too pure, to live n you had to explode" and
"I fought with my twin, that enemy within, 'til both of us fell by the
way. Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees while the I
looks the other way."

H.F.: Horseplay must be about heroin — but disease?
AK: Well, in the same period he wrote "Legionnaire's Disease" which
clearly describes tarantismo — the title slyly referring to North Africa
via the French Foreign Legion. "Some say it was radiation, some say
there was acid on the microphone, some say a combination turned their
hearts to stone. But whatever it was. it drove them to their knees. Oh,
I egionnaire's disease./ 1 wish I had a dollar for everyone that died that
year" (Edie Sedgewick? Jim Morrison.' Jimi Hendrix?) "Got 'em hot
In the collar, plenty an old maid's shed a tear: Now within my heart, it
sure put on a squeeze. Oh that Legionnaire's disease."
H.F.: Lean slammed Dylan for his "sniveling and snarling" in
NeuroPolitics — said that he almost single-handedly undermined the A-
quartan idealism oj the Psychedelic Movement.
AK: Yes. He called him "that Old Testament Masochism Bob." but he
also said he was mutating rapidly. But Allen Ginsberg said it best of
all in the liner notes for Desire (which by the way. was subtitled Songs
of Redemption): "loved like a thin terrified guru by every seeker in
America who heard that long-vowelled voice in heroic ecstatic trium-
phant how does it feel'... And behind it all the vast lone space... of
mindful conscious compassion. Enough Person revealed to make
Whitman's whole nation weep."

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